forums.cubicle7.co.uk

There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Good thing there's a bureaucracy to deal with them. Based on the Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross. Learn more at our website: http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/our-games/the-laundry/

I can simply refer to a Codename and the players look it up on their devices - saves exposition time at the table. Also, I can count on some of my players to binge-read this sort of thing, and then pose as Subject Matter Experts at the table, which moves the expository load from me onto them. (They also tend to extrapolate beyond what I wrote, adding their own interpretations, which can be interesting, illuminating, or side-splittingly incorrect.) There are also cross-references to things that are "ancient history" that actually informs how the organization's working today. It gives the players a better sense of the environment in which their characters are working.

When the players know what their characters know, I can offer them game signals more easily. When an NPC tells them something that diverges from the Archive notes, that NPC might be taking them beyond the available facts, or trying to mislead them, both of which can be interesting. And when the players start speculating at the table about motivations, access, and skullduggery, they're happily engaged and so am I. (I love those moments when I can be "the audience" to the story the players are concocting right in front of me.) [And if their take on events is more interesting than the one I had planned, I'll cheerfully co-opt it and tell them "Yes, you figured out their cunning plan!"]

Also, it's fun writing "the behind-the-scenes" version of history - I include links to various IRL Wikipedia articles, with comments on how the Laundry was really involved. Things like that. It's "chrome" trim - it doesn't affect how the game engine runs, it's shiny, it's neat. Some people codify 54 types of damage dice, with specified side-effects - I write mini-essays on weird corners of the weird fictional agency the PCs are involved in.

I sort of use the same thing but on paper.
There are casefiles describing involved fractions, and I frequently update the storyline.
Each player has a set of casefiles, so they can allways read up on the case the day before we play the game.

With a wiki, you could expand endlessly on what the laundry knows, but at the cost of the research skill.

I have had some assassination scenarios where the players are set up to assassinate some of the great old ones or outer gods, with a huge budget and full access to the stats of the monster, and some of these scenarios were actually some of the best I've had with the players.

They know their own skills, so knowing the skills and stats of the monster sort of makes the battle more "fair"
when the players get to plan the details after having scouted out the terrain and other potential threats.

I usually give the monster a random bunch of spells to give it a feeling of being a weird and alien intellect, and the random spells can really make carefull plans go awfully wrong